I was, when I was younger. I kind of don’t want to spend the rest of my life I have left tweaking some stupid theme that doesn’t matter in the long run. Whenever I reinstall, I pretty much just use it as is and probably only change the wallpaper and turn the theme to dark mode and that’s it.

I’m at the far end of the desktop tweaking inverted U curve and have achieved nirvana, with the new users at the beginning and you in the middle.

One-handed locking my PC as I leave my desk with Windows-L.

If you weren’t checking tech news regularly, shit like this just passes right over your head as a regular Linux user sometimes. I keep forgetting about the EoL thing.

Also having a clean frame of reference, if you have been a user for a long time now, you are definitely able to remember occasionally using a Windows machine and seeing the downhill slide literally happen before your eyes as everyone else is unaware of the growing pile of shit and getting slowly boiled like the frog in the pot.

The last version of Windows I’d consider clean of all this modern horseshit that’s in those OSes now would be Windows 2000. Even XP started pushing the telemetry shit hard and started getting sketchy towards the end.

Yeah, I used to install those a couple years ago as a security tech.

Unless they are at the register, those screens don’t even record back to a central DVR. Just a local SD card inside the screen itself. The only wire running to them is low voltage DC power, no video or network. Those things aren’t really an issue in the grand scheme, they are less intrusive than a regular security camera since you can’t even view them live at the head end.

Now the bigger ones hanging from a pole in the ceiling, yes those ARE being centrally recorded.

There’s an entire step between trying to figure it out yourself and resorting to an LLM which is probably likely to tell you to shove cheese into the USB ports. Regular web searching. Forum and social media posts. The distro’s wiki itself or other such resources. You know, the stuff the AI originally sucked up, mashed together, mixed around, and spat back out.

Congratulations. It’s come a loooong way. Long live Konqi the cyberdragon.

It’s okay, you can find alternative install media here: https://distrochooser.de/en/

Learning C: Random asterisks go

As an enby, this is my more easily attainable goal. Complete and utter confusion.

Texting this to my roommate who’s house I live in…

You gotta put the sticker on lest you forget it’s even there, just being an OS and getting out of your way.

This analogy doesn’t really work because there are thousands of different wheels that all spin on an axis but are used for many different things. If the wheel was never reinvented or improved upon we wouldn’t have automatic transmissions, rocket engine turbo pumps, gyroscopes, etc.

💜🫂

Those shitheads had an unintended opposite effect on me. All this attention on trans issues in the last decade or so made me think about some things about myself and my past and made me finally realize I’m not cisgendered either. 40+ years living as a man, and now am planning on going on HRT soon to live as the androgynous enby I really am.

Free antibiotics.

I for one have never imagined the Scratch cat in this way. I love this.

Don’t ever watch Looney Tunes. I think it will be way too upsetting for you.

Maybe. And I can’t blame it on not having had coffee when I made the comment. Just me being completely oblivious to a joke.

Or literally just look at its binary representation. If the least significant digit is a “1”, it’s odd, if “0”, it’s even. Or you can divide by 2 and check for a remainder.

Your method is just spending time grinding away CPU cycles for no reason.

Even when you move out of your parents’ place, you still have to play this fucking game with the plumber, cable tech, and possibly landlord if you rent, and continue to hide your shit.